Sunday, March 11, 2007
Karen Armstrong's A Short History of Myth was a disappointment. Much of the book is a rehash of The Great Transformation (which I enjoyed) and her other books. Her other books are wonderful, but this book is a missed opportunity to talk about myth. It degenerates into a cursory and random discussion of 20th century literature.
It does have a wonderful preface though, which begins like this:
Human beings have always been mythmakers. Archaelogists have unearthed Neanderthal graves containing weapons, tools and the bones of a sacrificed animal, all of which suggest some kind of belief in a future world that was similar to their own.
...
The Neanderthal graves tell us five improtant thigns about myth. First, it is nearly always rooted in the expreience of death and the fear of extinction. Second, the animal bones indicate that the burial was accompanied by a sacrifice. Mythology is usually inseparable from ritual. Many myths make no sense outside a liturgical drama that brings them to life, and are incomprehensible in a profane setting. Third, the Neanderthal muth was in some way recalled beside a grave, at the limit of human life. The most powerful myths are about extremity; they force us to go beyond our experience. There are moments when we all, in one way or another, have to go to a place that we have never seen, and do what we have never done before. Myth is about the unknown; it is about that for which initially we have no words. Myth therefore look into the heart of a great silence. Fourth, myth is not a story told for its own sake. It show us how we should behave. In the Neanderthal graves, the corpse has sometimes been placed in a foetal position, as though for rebirth: the deceased had to take the next step himself. Correctly understood, mythology puts us in the correct spiritual or psychological posture for right action, in this world or the next. Finally, all mythology speaks of another plane that exists alongside our own world, nad that in some sense supports it. Belief in this invisible but more powerful reality, sometimes called the world of the gods, is a basic theme of mythology.
What a concise summary of the structure of Mythology.
Her second point is the relationship between Myth & Ritual. Jane Harrison's books Prolegomena and Themis are fascinating accounts of this topic.
Her second, third and fourth points all connect to the fact that myths (like many Native American "folktales") were sacred speech. These stories were recited only during rituals (ie. initation), had an important instructive role, and were not to be retold lightly (much less for amusement or to outsiders). Many of the Indians who passed these stories along to ethnographers were violating a deep taboo. For the same reasons, it is reasonable to believe that many important myths were never recorded.
Herodotus, whose histories often links myths with rituals, carefully refuses to speak about either when he feels that a secret must be kept. It is not like him; he loves to retell a good tale.
